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When I was little, one of my absolute favorite meals was my mom’s quiche. Delicate, yet simultaneously and sinfully rich, it seemed like a cloud made of cheese and egg and flecked with sought-after pieces of yummy bacon. I rejoiced when I heard, after school, that it was on the menu. The whole time I was growing up, I’d hear people asking her for the recipe. I took it to a potluck once and a guy told me it was one of the best quiches he’d ever tasted. It was like this magical and complicated dish that my mother produced with her highest order homemaking skills.

The time in my life that I most closely associate with the quintessential American childhood is the nearly four years my family spent based at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, NE. I’m not going to say that Omaha was the coolest place I’ve ever lived. However, freshly returned from two years in Europe, where we had no Saturday morning cartoons and no trick-or-treating, our tract home in Bellevue, NE was pretty much Norman Rockwellesque to my brother and me. There were school buses, lots of other kids, girl scouts, and games of Ghost in the Graveyard at twilight. It was good.

During that time in my life, roughly ages eight to twelve, I had a couple of really close “best” friends with whom I don’t recall ever having any serious disagreements. Their names were Kristine and Kim, and they lived in the same cul-de-sac a few streets away from me. We biked, played outside, did crafts, and sold girl scout cookies together. You know – pretty squeaky clean fun.

Kristine, Kim, and me with our girl scout counselor at winter camp in Council Bluffs, Iowa